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This free project budget template is a downloadable PowerPoint slide intended to help business professionals simplify budget planning and tracking. The template displays the major phases and tasks of a project on a timeline, with cost estimation and budget utilization (%) assigned to each, while also illustrating the approximate duration of each task. Using this simple budget-and-timeline layout, project managers can:
- Provide a comprehensive overview of the project on a single slide, without the need of complex spreadsheets and charts. This makes the template a useful tool for presentations to clients and executives.
- Easily estimate how much money will be spent by the end of each project phase or within a given time period.
- Illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the project plan and budget, showing how changes in the project scope or timeline can impact the costs.
- "Pulse-check" the project to instantly see whether it’s on track and on budget or not.
- Ensure ideal timing for transferring funds into the project account. Usually, the money necessary to finance each initiative is transferred shortly before it is needed. If the transfer is made too far in advance, the organization can lose the opportunity to use those funds somewhere else. If the funding for a specific activity comes late, it may cause delays in the start of that activity.
Customizing the budget template
The project budget template is a native Microsoft PowerPoint slide, which means it can be easily edited, updated and shared by anyone who has the application installed. Every object on the graphic is customizable, so users can change colors, texts, shapes and sizes, add or edit dates or task durations for increased accuracy, or insert extra categories and activities.
Professionals can make such customizations manually, using PowerPoint’s editing functions, or they can speed up the process with Office Timeline, a PowerPoint add-in that enables users to easily create clear project visuals for important communications. Office Timeline Plus makes it simple to enter or import project data right into the budget template and updates it instantly when plans change. Using the add-in, project managers can quickly repurpose the template for status reports or other communications instead of having to create new visuals from scratch every time.
